Budget deal close with $33B in cuts

Budget talks came to life Wednesday but not without tension between the White House and Senate Democrats, worried that the administration was too quick to agree to $33 billion in spending cuts to try to move Speaker John Boehner toward what remains a very uncertain deal.

Vice President Joe Biden and White House Budget Director Jack Lew came to the Capitol in the evening for a meeting with the party leadership requested by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Democrats fear that unless the administration takes a stronger stand now, President Barack Obama will only be nibbled to death and be weaker when he faces the Republicans again this spring over the bigger fight of raising the debt ceiling.

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Biden confirmed the new target on spending cuts, putting the best face on the deal for Democrats and in his trademark style, trying to add a little punch to the administration’s stance— still hampered by Obama’s detachment from the budget fight.

“The main reason to be here today is to make sure that Democrats in the Senate and the president are on the same page,” Biden assured reporters. “We’re on the same page.”

“We’re working off the same number now,” Biden said, referencing his conversation earlier in the day with Boehner. “Obviously, the difference in composition of that number, what’s included, what’s not included is going to be a through negotiation. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves.”

“There’s no reason why, with all that’s going on in the world and this economy, we can’t reach an agreement to avoid a government shutdown because the bottom line here is that we’re working off the same number now. It’s about how.”

“The Democrats are in full agreement on what we don’t want to do in that number. We don’t want to eviscerate the ability of the economy to grow. So we’re going to have a real debate.”

That said, there is very little time left for public debate with the government slated to run out of operating funds at the end of next week. And Biden’s high-profile comments could complicate life for Boehner, who will have a tough time selling the proposal to his caucus and already faces a tea party rally—demanding more cuts—on Thursday.

Absent from that Senate meeting — but central to the Democratic concerns — was White House chief of staff Bill Daley, who has twice prodded the talks along with the promise of more Democratic spending cuts but never gotten a firm commitment from Boehner for a top-line number.

Daley’s latest intervention came by way of a phone call to the speaker Monday that set the stage for the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to begin meeting Wednesday to work toward the new target of $1.055 trillion, $33 billion less than the spending rate when this Congress began and $73 billion below Obama’s initial 2011 budget requests.

That’s the midpoint of a range previously discussed by Reid and Boehner’s representatives, but Democrats complained that Daley committed them to $3 billion more in cuts without any certainty that Boehner will not demand more.

Indeed, Biden himself called Boehner Wednesday in an apparent effort to lock in the number, but the speaker reserved the right to demand more reductions, depending on the fate of funding limitations and policy riders conservatives also want in the final bill.